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Yeah, I know what you mean. That’s what I meant when I mentioned fanboying though I can’t really decide on how I feel about the order since I have not played XC2, XSIII, and I dropped XSII halfway. But maybe someday I’ll get to that. As for now, I’m on the fence whether I like XC or XCX better. I just beat chapter 9 and on my way to get flight, so I hope that can breathe some new life into the game for me because after a whole weekend of doing almost exclusively side content, as much as I love the game overall, I am starting to feel burnt out (which, as I think I’ve mentioned before, wasn’t the case for me with the Witcher 3, oddly enough, despite me spending a stupid amount of time on that game and I really felt like I could have played more). Chapter 9 has pretty much co firmed my suspicions regarding the twist, and were it not for the fact that I have two more party members to unlock and that I need to keep my levels up, Jd be tempted to just rush the remaining three chapters of the game.

Meanwhile the Zodiac Age is running nicely, though I won’t be playing yet. I am, however, thinking about job choices, and while I’m pretty set on Archer/Red Battlemage for Fran and Knight/Bushi, I don’t know what order I should go with for them, and I’m not really sure how to handle all the other characters. I guess I’ll see how it goes once I get down to it. I probably won’t be playing it right after X, though, considering open world burnout

Thanks, I’ll take a look. Still, it does feel a lot shorter even that Xenoblade 1. After meeting Melia, there was still the whole trip to Mechonis, the Severed Hand, the return of Fiora, and then the big twist and there was quite a bit of story content before the end. Over here, a big thing happened, and there’s just four story missions left - and they’re never really long (like I said, not really a bad thing since most of the character centric stuff is in the affinity missions now), and I can see what twist the game is setting up, but it really doesn’t feel like a lot. On Xenogears it was curveball after curveball, and even XC1 did those, but over here there just doesn’t seem to be enough room for it since aside from the story missions, the game kinda needs to follow a strict formula because of the gameplay. That said, I’m not complaining really, sonde if the twist is what I think it is, it’s well foreshadowed and is much more grounded and in line with the game’s themes than Takahashi’s usual shocking swerves. I guess it just comes with the territory of the game not being a hero’s journey and the exploration of the world being non-linear.

That said, I do feel villains are uncharacteristically weak for Takahashi. There were some nice side missions with really scary human villains whose shade of villainy was very effectively grounded and that definitely helped make them hit much closer to home, but while it nicely reinforces the theme and is perfectly in line with this harder sci go setting, they’re not really characters, per de, and disappear after they’re dealt with in the mission. The main villains, meanwhile, are just... not complex, for now at least. Although one recurring antagonist kinda died anticlimactically and wasn’t really given much of a character so. The only interesting antagonists so far are quite obviously set up to turn face later on. But who knows. Maybe I’ll be surprised. If my suspicions on the twist are correct, we might be getting a very interesting antagonist still. But it’s still kind of the Disney villain problem - they used to be a big presence but now they’re dying out, replaced by perhaps more nuanced but also less impressive antagonists.

So X’s story seems to be picking up. I mean, about time, since I’m 2/3rds of the chapters in. I mean, it’s not like the rest is bad, since I love the story the game builds just around the world and the quests, if that makes sense - you get a feel of what the stakes really are through the non-linear aspect of the story, the whole stuff I mentioned about humanity cooperating etc. but now the linear bit of the story has reached a sort of climax. Honestly, though, it still kinda feels like not a lot. Like the climax of a Takahashi game’s first act, rather than the whole thing, if you know what I mean.

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